Gods without Men by Hari Kunzru: review

Philip Womack is enchanted and thrilled by Gods without Men, Hari
Kunzru's dazzling new novel.

By Philip Womack

11:20AM BST 22 Aug 2011

Somewhere in the wilds of the American desert stand three rocks, known as the Pinnacles. For centuries, they have been the focus of mystical thought, visions and encounters. Here an 18th-century priest saw an angel; here local tribes identify a connecting point between the worlds of the living and the dead; here, in the Forties, a man called Schmidt met two aliens in a “disc of light”.

The Pinnacles have long been a focus of manhunts and disappearances: an Indian brave (supposedly) shot dead by a posse who mistakenly thought he’d kidnapped a child; a little girl disappearing at a flying saucer convention, last seen in conversation with a “glow boy”. Cults flourish and die around the rocks; dark fissures in the stone are peopled with mad hermits.

Many threads run through Hari Kunzru’s intensely involving novel: racism, culture clashes, immigration, religion. Experiences are echoed and reflected, with all its characters converging on the Pinnacles, each in search of some form of escape.

The book dashes in and out of the centuries, swiftly following a disparate (but, in often surprising and interesting ways, interconnected) bunch of characters. Kunzru’s writing is brisk, vivid and inventive: from the very first sentence you know that you are being taken in the right direction by someone who knows what he is doing.

The central plot concerns a New York couple, Lisa and Jaz. Sophisticated and rich, they stand up to their parents’ disapproval and marry (Jaz is the son of subcontinental Indian peasants who live in self-imposed isolation, while Lisa’s father treats him “like some impressive but unpredictable exotic pet”). Their autistic son proves not to be a unifying force, but another cause for concern.

Kunzru’s evocation of the emotional extremes traversed by Jaz and Lisa is very convincing: the weight of having what is effectively an alien being in the family; the pain of parental love that goes unreciprocated.

Kunzru shows how Lisa’s desperate attempts to find a cure in esoteric methods are no different from Jaz’s mother’s chants and blessings. Seeking escape, they go on holiday, and their son's disappearance by the Pinnacles causes a media storm.

Everything in this novel bounces off everything else, like lights shimmering on water. Schmidt, having leveraged his experience into the leadership of a cult, speaks of the number 486 and its “central role in the harmonics of space and time, connected as it is with the universal interdimensional constant aum”. Kunzru juxtaposes this with a banker, with whom Jaz works, who has a “graph plotting the Dow Jones Industrial Average against phases of Saturn”.

Kunzru argues that the mystical, in whatever form it takes, is ingrained in the human condition. There are things about ourselves and the universe which do not make sense, or cannot make sense without some other factor, whether it’s Shiva, God or Coyote – or the beautiful coincidences of mathematics in a trading model.

One of the most intriguing images in the book is of an Indian man, running “in the old way”, seemingly able to cover tens, even hundreds of feet in one bound. It’s a fine comparison for the novel, too: leaping into strange territory, faster and faster, swallowing up tracts of subject matter, but always knowing exactly where it’s going. Sometimes dizzying, sometimes puzzling, always enjoyable, Gods Without Men is one of the best novels of the year.